Decentralized Finance Weekly Thoughts: USDT0 Full Chain Expansion, Veteran Players Unite and Return

ETH upgrade RWA, cooking, DeFi giants join together to start exclusive Lego time, thoughts on DeFi in the past week:

1/ ETH has risen sharply in the last half month, coinciding with the upgrade of Pectra (1) Personally, I think the rise has something to do with this, but it is not dominant (2) It is more of an excessive fud, and there is also an expectation that ETF pledge will pass (3) Previously, the ETH/BTC exchange rate has approached the lowest point However, the content of this upgrade is still very worth a look, and it is a bit long to expand, and it has been summarized and sorted out to gitbook

2/ The DeFi giants unite: Aave Uniswap

Aave plans to launch Uniswap V4 Hook, supporting Uni V4 LP collateralized loans for GHO. This plan requires applying for a portion of funds from the Uniswap DAO, and in return, will share the interest income from GHO lending with the Uniswap DAO in the future.

This is currently the most practical Hook, benefiting both giants at the same time. The capital efficiency of LP is improved, and the combinability and flexibility of Hook are beginning to show. With leading projects taking the lead, we can expect more innovations in the future.

3/ DeFi giants unite: Aave Pendle Ethena

(1) Ethena PT tokens are integrated into Aave, strong demand (2) Ethena continues to deepen its integration with Aave to list USDtb, increase the supply limit of USDe and sUSDe, and increase the upper limit of PT tokens. After PT enters Aave: The old DeFi people who love revolving loans have started to work, and it is another three-way cooperation that will benefit from it, and as the DeFi blue chips begin to mature, they will enter the exclusive Lego time of the DeFi head project. Compared to DeFi Summer, Lego is more stable and has a larger capacity.

4/ Unichain liquidity mining situation

(1) Unichain Liquidity Mining Production Halved (2) Incentives for WBTC Pool will be migrated Gauntlet's statement is that the KPI has been exceeded, so the income has been lowered, and the TVL has not dropped too much. The yield is still within the acceptable range of the market, and it should be noted that after 7 days, the rewards of WBTC-related pools will gradually be transferred to WBTC0 (OFT version), and Unichain is currently deeply bound to L0.

5/ SSV Network announced the launch of the SSV 2.0 testnet and introduced a new concept called bApps, a new type of Decentralized Finance application that directly utilizes Ethereum validators to ensure security, rather than relying on additional capital. Validators can earn extra income by providing security services for bApps.

At first glance, it sounds like Restaking, but there is actually a bit of a difference: Restaking locks the staked ETH into a new protocol to provide security for these protocols.

These assets are subject to slashing, and if there are issues with the protocol, the validator's assets may be at risk of loss.

Ethereum itself may also be affected. The characteristic of SSV 2.0 is that the staked ETH of validators will not be slashed due to protocol issues, protecting Ethereum from cascading risks. This means that if bApps encounter problems, it will not affect the stability of the Ethereum mainnet.

Due to the limited ability of Restaking to attract clients at the current stage, there hasn't been enough demand generated, so this service may struggle to gain attention in the short term. Mechanically speaking, SSV 2.0 does have its own characteristics and is indeed superior to Restaking on paper.

Returning to the DVT track itself, it did not stand firm in the last cycle, and it will be even harder in this cycle. The advantage is that the demand is relatively certain, but the problem is that most will be integrated by giants. Now SSV and Obol are actively changing the situation, hoping to break through from other angles. It is worth paying attention to and observing.

6/ Obol announces Obol Stack

The design of Obol Stack packages the autonomous operation of validators, allowing everyone to directly call and deploy validator nodes and sorters. Officials/third parties package this infrastructure into "Apps" and release them to the Obol App Store, where users can directly acquire and deploy their own nodes.

This brings us one step closer to Vitalik's initial advocacy that everyone can run an Ethereum node in every corner of the world.

7/ USD₮0 is rapidly expanding

USDT0 is a fully-chain stablecoin jointly launched by Tether and LayerZero, realized through the OFT technology of L0, and it has already supported many mainstream chains.

This solution directly competes with USDC CCTP, with the difference being that the USDC solution is more native and centralized, whereas USDT0 relies on LayerZero, and USDT0 has also received many resources in terms of ecosystem.

For example, you can mine on Unichain and provide liquidity on Flare to receive ecological subsidies.

Overall, there will be many farming opportunities, and it can be considered as supported by Tether. In the future, we will see more and more USDT(USDT0) on the chain.

8/ Noticed two movements from the old DeFi.

(1) Liquity V2 Announces Upcoming Relaunch, Bug Fixes (2) Alchemix heralds an imminent return Liquity V2 suffered a security breach around April 15, 2025, resulting in the suspension of the protocol. This vulnerability involves a complex attack, it remains to be seen after it is re-launched, in fact, V1 is a design I prefer, although V1 has some problems in efficiency and scaling, but it is simple and effective, it has been forked by N multiple projects, and the change of V2 is a breakthrough, but there are indeed some minus in the handling of security, under observation.

Alchemix is one of several bright projects in the last bull market DeFi 2.0 era, and it may start to be reshaped in the near future, but compared to Euler and Maple, Alchemix is a community-oriented project, and if it can't come up with any killer tricks, its competitiveness is relatively limited. You can pay attention to it first.

9/ There are many RWA actions.

Securitize has issued a packaged version for BlackRock's tokenized fund used for Decentralized Finance, which I think is quite an important point.

Others include: (1) VanEck partners with Securitize to launch a tokenized fund (2) Stripe to launch a stablecoin financial account (3) Arbitrum approves allocation of 35M ARB to tokenized U.S. Treasury bonds (4) Aave's RWA platform Horizon has partnered with AntChain to allow staking RWA assets to borrow stablecoins One of the more interesting ones, The incentive mechanism for USDB supported by Stripe Financial accounts is that when using USDB, the earnings of the underlying asset (such as interest on money market funds) will be paid to developers in the form of fees.

10/ Another noteworthy point about RWA is that Chainlink, J.P. Morgan, and Ondo Finance have collaborated to achieve cross-chain settlement for tokenized U.S. Treasuries.

Ondo Chain is a public chain, while Kinexys is a permissioned chain. The interoperability between these two types of chains requires additional technical support, and the current solution being used is Chainlink.

In the future, it is expected that Chainlink will occupy a certain ecological niche in the field of RWA cross-chain settlement. If RWA explodes as anticipated, then $LINK is a very good target, while also having the backing of being the leader in oracle technology.